“I
can no longer say that this Cold War will not lead to a ‘Hot War.’ I
fear that they could risk it. […]The statements and propaganda on both
sides make me fear the worst. If anyone loses their nerve in this
charged atmosphere, we will not survive the next few years. […]I do not
say such things lightly….I am a man with a conscience. But that’s how it
is. I’m really extremely worried.” ~Mikhail Gorbachev

“I’m
uneasy about beginning a process of military engagement without knowing
where it will lead us and what we’ll do to sustain it. […] I believe we
should avoid taking incremental steps before we know how far we are
willing to go. This is a territory 300 miles from Moscow, and therefore
has special security implications.” ~Henry Kissinger

“It
is an extremely dangerous development, which has been brewing ever since
Washington violated its verbal promises to Gorbachev and began expanding
NATO to the East, right to Russia’s borders, and threatening to
incorporate Ukraine, which is of great strategic significance to Russia
and of course has close historical and cultural links. […] The Russian
autocracy is far from blameless, but we are now back to earlier comments:
we have come perilously close to disaster before, and are toying with
catastrophe again. It is not that possible peaceful solutions are
lacking.” ~Noam Chomsky

“Outside
countries should leave Ukraine to resolve the conflict itself. However,
even as the US demands that the Russians de-escalate, the United States
is busy escalating! […] Why is ‘winning’ Ukraine so important to
Washington? Why are they risking a major war with Russia to deny people
in Ukraine the right to self-determination? Let’s just leave Ukraine
alone!” ~Ron Paul

* * *

One can rarely find four thinkers as distinct from one another as
Gorbachev, Kissinger, Chomsky, and Ron Paul, and yet, for all of their
differences, each of them is clearly guided by a systematic, thoroughly
considered intellectual framework. All four of these thinkers have
concluded, starting from different practical and moral premises, that
further escalation of the Ukraine crisis by the United States would be a
dangerous, deeply inadvisable behavior.

Two of these thinkers – Gorbachev and Kissinger – played crucial roles
in helping to maneuver the world out of the existential danger of the
Cold War. One might consider them to have made tactical or even moral
errors, but they deserve recognition for being among the cooler heads
that prevailed, helping defuse decades-long tensions between the United
States and the Soviet Union that could have easily ended in a nuclear
holocaust.

The other two thinkers – Chomsky and Paul – are thought leaders of
principled polar opposites of American thought, left-progressivism and
right-libertarianism. While sharply at odds over economics, philosophy,
and politics, these two systems are both vastly superior to the American
political establishment, which is dominated by a tight alliance of
special-interest pressure groups, whose primary purpose is to protect
existing political privileges through lobbying at the expense of
innovative entrepreneurs, consumers, and people of merit in general.
Left-progressives and right-libertarians each have a vision of human
dignity and morality that is driven by principles and conscience. The
American political establishment, represented by virtually
indistinguishable “neoconservative” Republicans and “humanitarian
interventionist” Democrats, is driven solely by the impulse to entrench
the politically connected interests of the status quo at all costs.
While both right-libertarians and left-progressives strongly favor peace
as an integral component in their project to improve human well-being,
the amoral interventionist political establishment in the United States
does not care about human well-being. Bombs will drop, drones will
massacre innocent civilians, everyone will be deprived of privacy,
dignity, and due process – but they will have their privileges and their
dominance, even though the world might burn for it.

The “neoconservatives” and “humanitarian interventionists” in the United
States speak and act out of misguided short-sightedness, but the
pressure they constantly exert on President Barack Obama could be the
greatest threat to world peace and the progress of human civilization
today, turning a tragic but local conflict into one that could escalate
into World War III.

Obama rose to power through left-progressive idealistic rhetoric, but he
has shown to be far more inclined toward accommodation to the entrenched
political establishment. Even so, he has been reluctant to send lethal
weapons to Ukraine, as vestiges of his left-progressivism have given him
justified unease at the prospect. Yet the chorus of establishment hawks
has recently grown to a warmongering holler. The worst among them are
John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who even seek
to mandate that Obama
send weapons to the Ukrainian regime of Petro Poroshenko and Arseniy
Yatseniuk. This same regime has been confirmed to have murdered over
5,300 of its own civilian population, to have employed savage,
indiscriminate tactics – such as the deliberate shelling of densely
populated neighborhoods and the use of cluster munitions – to have
reinstituted military conscription at the point of a gun, and to have
incorporated overtly fascist paramilitary “volunteer” units into
Ukraine’s military structure. American “neoconservative” and
“humanitarian interventionist” politicians, in the name of humanitarian
ideals (mostly, vague sound bites about “territorial integrity” and
“national self-determination” – neither of which concepts they actually
respect with any consistency), seek to aid and abet genuine moral
monsters who have already killed thousands and terrorized and displaced
millions.

The civil war in Ukraine has thus far been confined within the borders
of Ukraine, with modest support from Vladimir Putin’s regime for the
Donetsk and Luhansk separatists. (If Putin’s support were indeed
decisive or fully commensurate with his abilities, he would have
occupied all of
Ukraine by now – but his behavior demonstrates that this is not his
intention. Putin does not have any grand design on Ukraine, and his
sporadic assistance to the separatists has largely been reactive, to
prevent their complete obliteration.) If the United States funnels
weapons to the Poroshenko/Yatseniuk regime, a local conflict will be
turned into a global one, with the United States fighting a proxy war
against Russia. If the United States then makes the fateful step of
introducing ground troops, the proxy war will quickly turn into a direct
war. From a direct conventional war to a nuclear war is only a small
step, which is why the actual strategists of the Cold War – wiser men
than today’s hawks – understood that it would be unacceptable for the
militaries of the United States and the Soviet Union to ever fight one
another directly.

Arming the Ukrainian government will perpetuate its ability to inflict a
massive death toll upon civilians. Furthermore, it would be completely
counterproductive to any lasting peace. Both the separatists and Putin
will see it as a validation of the claim that the United States has been
behind the “regime change” in Ukraine all along. They will furthermore
see it as another step toward Ukraine’s absorption into NATO – an
alliance that was originally formed specifically to counter the Soviet
Union. One of Putin’s consistent demands throughout the past year has
been for a commitment that Ukraine’s membership in NATO would be out of
the question. It should be an easy commitment to give – considering that
NATO has no real appetite to allow Ukraine to join, and Ukraine’s
precarious situation would only endanger the security of all other NATO
members, who would be compelled to assist in any of Ukraine’s wars. Yet,
instead of acceding to this one demand – which could resolve everything
– Western governments have given the Poroshenko/Yatseniuk regime every
hope of eventual NATO membership, with no intention of following through.
Still, sending weapons at this juncture would strongly reinforce this
hope on the part of Poroshenko and Yatseniuk, and the corresponding fear
on the part of Putin.

“As tragic as it might be,
Putin’s most advantageous response to any US decision to
send arms to Ukraine would be to immediately escalate the
situation, before those arms could arrive to make a
difference on the battlefield.”

While thoughtful men of principle and even hyper-intelligent ruthless
pragmatists (like Kissinger) are against escalating the Ukraine crisis,
the “neoconservatives” and “humanitarian interventionists” are neither
thoughtful nor pragmatic. Many of them are driven by blind hatred for
Russia and a desire to re-ignite the Cold War to re-live its alleged
glory days. They would again place the world just a few steps away from
nuclear annihilation, just to re-enter a paradigm which is conceptually
familiar to them. They are so afraid of a possible new world of hyper-pluralism,
individualism, accelerating technological progress, and the irrelevance
of national boundaries – that they would place all humankind at risk
just to avert their discomfort. Perhaps some of them truly believe their
own rhetoric – that Vladimir Putin is a new Hitler and that the
annexation of Crimea – a historically Russian territory until Khrushchev
gave it to Ukraine in 1954 in order to gain support from the leadership
of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – is in any way similar to
Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938. (Never mind that Putin
has never perpetrated a Holocaust and that the ethnic chauvinists,
xenophobes, and anti-Semites are predominantly fighting on the side of
the Ukrainian government and wearing Nazi emblems – while many of
Putin’s unofficial allies have donned the emblems used by the Russian
resistance to the Nazi invasion during World War II!) Perhaps some of
the hawks truly believe that the United States has a moral duty to
spread “democracy” and “self-determination” at the barrel of a gun to
the rest of the world, and to serve as a global policeman, punishing all
violations of these vaunted American principles. Yet what the ordinary
people who suffer the consequences of American foreign-policy
interventionism see are not “democracy” and “self-determination”, but
rather dead bodies and homes reduced to rubble. Yes, Vladimir Putin is a
ruthless autocrat who suppresses dissent and free inquiry. Yes, Viktor
Yanukovych was a corrupt kleptocrat who sometimes employed thugs to
deter and punish criticism of his expropriation of the Ukrainian people.
At worst, Yanukovych may have ordered snipers from the Berkut police to
fire upon the Maidan protesters during his last days in power (although
it is perplexing why the snipers fired upon both the protesters and at
Berkut police themselves). But
neither of them murdered thousands of innocents among their own
population, nor used indiscriminate shelling against them. It
is one matter to suffer under a repressive autocracy, which will spare
you if you keep your head down; it is quite another to quake under
omnipresent brutality, murder, and destruction, from which no one is
safe and where your next trip to the grocery store could result in your
limbs being torn from your body. People who, under Yanukovych, were able
to eke out a modest living and hope for gradual improvement, have been
devastated and sometimes utterly destroyed by the savage Ukrainian civil
war. A swath of Third-World barbarism has been carved out of a region
that had, for seventy years, only known drab Second-World sub-optimality.
Even if Putin were attempting to resurrect the Soviet Union – quite a
far-fetched allegation – the Ukrainian government is creating another
Liberia in Europe.

As tragic as it might be, Putin’s most advantageous response to any US
decision to send arms to Ukraine would be to immediately escalate the
situation, before those arms could arrive to make a difference on the
battlefield. This means that the trickle of Putin’s support for the
separatists would become a flood, and it would not be surprising if
Russian forces directly and openly entered Ukraine and pressed toward
Kiev. Undoubtedly, the Ukrainian military would put up a stiff
resistance and turn every civilian settlement along the way into another
Donetsk Airport. Tens of thousands of soldiers and innocent civilians
would be killed in the process, and all of their lives would be lost in
vain. Nobody truly wants this outcome, but the hawks in the US Congress
are blinded by their desire to punish Russia. They fail to realize that
this carnage is precisely the result they would get by further goading
Putin on with escalation from the American side. In the face of such
thoughtless saber-rattling, one should applaud the frantic, heroic
efforts of European leaders – particularly Germany’s Angela Merkel and
France’s François Hollande – to forestall a deadly and irreversible
sequence of events and to reach a diplomatic solution.

“A bad peace is better than a good war,” counsels an old Jewish and
Russian proverb. Benjamin Franklin agreed. “There was never a good War,
or a bad Peace,” he wrote in his bestselling Poor
Richard’s Almanack – one of 18th-century
America’s civilizing moral influences. Right now a sub-optimal peace –
what some would consider a bad peace – is the best that could be hoped
for in Ukraine. This would involve some manner of sustainable
demarcation between the territory held by the Ukrainian government and
the rebel People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. It does not matter
whether this demarcation takes the form of officially recognized
independence or broad “regional autonomy” – as long as the shells stop
falling and the civilians stop dying. National borders are artificial
fictions, but human lives are real. It does not matter where officials
and diplomats decide to draw their lines on the map, as long as the
result is a mutually acceptable understanding of future behaviors, by
which living humans would be spared from slaughter.

The Minsk Agreement reached in September 2014 was unsustainable
precisely because the Ukrainian government never intended to abide by
the agreed-upon demarcation line; Ukrainian troops stubbornly held onto
the ghastly, apocalyptic ruin of the once-state-of-the-art Donetsk
Airport, despite the fact that it will never be usable as an airport
again. According to the Minsk Agreement, the Donetsk Airport was to fall
within the autonomous separatist-held territory. Its location was
sufficiently close to the city of Donetsk for the Ukrainian army to
continue to shell civilian neighborhoods. Understandably, the separatist
rebels could not tolerate such a situation of perpetual bombardments,
and so they threw their forces at the airport in wave after wave of
bloody assaults, until it finally fell. Unfortunately, what also fell in
this struggle was the entire premise of a sustainable demarcation line.
The Ukrainian government would not respect its commitments, so the
separatists saw no need to respect theirs as well. They have launched an
offensive in the hopes of creating more buffer territory around their
capitals of Donetsk and Luhansk. Tragically, this offensive involves
shelling of population centers such as Debaltseve and Mariupol, whose
residents are innocent victims, much like the inhabitants of Luhansk and
Donetsk. In perpetrating these attacks, the separatists have become as
bad as the regime forces they oppose – using the same indiscriminate
tactics and the same mass-impact weapons.

It does not matter which side bombards the civilians of Eastern Ukraine,
who used to be one another’s neighbors and whose social, cultural, and
economic lives used to be tightly intertwined. All of these assaults are
a savage, ultimately pointless folly. The lives they take can never be
restored, and the ill will they engender can never abate. This is why
the idea that the Ukrainian government should ever regain de
facto control over the
separatist-occupied regions is an absurdity. Who would accept living
under a government that murdered their neighbors and families and ruined
what meager livelihoods they had? A lasting peace agreement might keep
these territories nominally within the boundaries of Ukraine, in order
to save face diplomatically, but the actual governance of these
territories must be delegated to the people who live there, even if
these people would make economically and politically counterproductive
decisions. Donetsk and Luhansk might well become neo-communist enclaves
and will certainly need decades of painstakingly slow economic recovery
to restore 2013-level standards of living. However unfortunate this may
all be, it is better than children being blown to bits. If peace is
restored, along with free movement across borders (which existed prior
to the civil war), the more ambitious and talented residents of these
territories will be able to emigrate to the West, to Israel, or even to
Russia, where their prospects would be greatly improved. Such emigration
has already been happening for decades and has enabled the best minds
and the better cultural vestiges of the former Soviet republics to be
preserved.

With two key points – (i) broad autonomy for the rebel-held areas,
separated by a buffer zone to prevent shelling of population centers,
and (ii) a commitment for Ukraine never to join NATO – a peace plan
might just avert escalation of the savage Ukrainian civil war. There may
still be occasional violations of any resulting cease-fire, since
neither side has full control over its fighters. However, redirecting
the incentives and conversation away from escalation and toward peaceful
coexistence is imperative to avoid making this tragedy worse. Eventually,
if peace becomes the general rule rather than the exception, armed
attacks in the region could equilibrate to a level very close to zero,
and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics could become unofficial
statelets, like Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia – de
facto autonomous
enclaves that are governed poorly but pose no threat to world peace or
to anyone outside their boundaries.

If, on the other hand, weapons are sent to the Poroshenko/Yatseniuk
regime and events spiral out of control into a World War III, then all
of human civilization would
be in grave danger. Decades of economic, technological, and cultural
progress could be wiped out in days. The infrastructure – not just in
Eastern Ukraine but in the West itself – could be devastated
sufficiently to bring about another Dark Age, if humankind survives at
all. Gone would be the dreams of colonizing other planets, dramatically
extending human lifespans and curing chronic diseases, creating radical
abundance through technological innovation, and obliterating age-old
superstitions and oppressions. The old hawks who seek to relive the Cold
War would plunge the world into a predicament far worse – all because
they could not let go of their fear, their hatred, and their obsolete
zero-sum “us versus them” worldview. Putin would, of course, also be
complicit in such a scenario, but not because he would have made the
first move. His foremost objective – as has been the case for every
Russian autocrat – will be to avoid humiliation and save face, to claim
a dignified resolution with an image of strength – no matter what the
substantive outcome, in order to avoid domestic unrest. For Russian
strongmen, much is forgiven – but losing a war (or seeming to lose it)
is unacceptable and is practically a sentence of deposition, if not
death. This is why, if the West ratchets up military pressure on Putin,
he will have no incentive to put the brakes on the deadly cycle of
escalation.

The saber-rattling of hawks in the US Congress and their supporters
threatens the progress and the very survival of humankind. One can only
hope that cooler heads – the thinkers, the thoughtful idealists, the
pragmatists, the diplomats – will prevail and enable a local conflict to
remain local and to eventually subside. The next few decades will be
crucial for setting the course of human civilization for millennia hence
– if people of conscience will be able to wrest those millennia from the
short-sighted jingoists who would rob us of them.

Gennady Stolyarov II is a science
fiction novelist and philosophical essayist, and is Editor-in-Chief
of The Rational Argumentator. He lives in Carson City,
Nevada.